Pitchfork

This is the first gig I've been to where almost everyone in the audience hoped and expected to leave in pain: My Bloody Valentine's show finale, the white noise coda to "You Made Me Realise", has become as central to their legend as the bankrupt record label and the endlessly scrapped new material. Everyone in the Roundhouse was waiting for it, many had probably wondered how they might react, how extreme things could possibly get. My friend counted the stacks of amps onstage: He reached 12, every one of them facing into a neatly attached mic. "No good," he said, "can come of this." He was grinning.

And they played it. It lasted 15 minutes, almost to the second. As anticipated, it was devastating, promethean, exhilarating noise. At the end the audience were wincing, dazed, laughing, and not one person there looked disappointed: The perfect conclusion to a comeback that had already satisfied on every level.

Everything My Bloody Valentine played on Friday night was old material: It didn't matter-- none of it was familiar. In Pitchfork's Top 100 Albums of the 1990s feature, Mark Richardson talked about the vain and frustrating search for something that was "Like Loveless, but more". Here it was: There were moments-- the totalizing crush of "Slow", an unrecognizably venomous "Thorn"-- when texture and volume hit perfect balance and MBV's hallowed recordings seemed like genteel postcards from the corona of this vast solar sound.

On record, it's easier to appreciate the dazed beauty of the band's music-- and easier to take it for granted, given how their records kicked off an entire genre. Live, the beauty was both more fragile and more awesome-- it was fighting to survive in an extreme environment. It was testament to the group's dexterity in handling noise that noise isn't my primary memory of the night. The bubblegum riff on "I Only Said", the cold haze of "Lose My Breath", the sludgy euphoria of "Come in Alone"-- all played at eviscerating volume, all still somehow, god knows how, pop songs. "Blown a Wish" was transformed-- its baggy-era drum programming gained some serious sinew, and that most forgettable element of the song on record became its unstoppable center on stage. The group, I remembered, was always smarter and more versatile rhythmically than most of its imitators.

Which brings us to "Soon". For most of the show the visuals mixed strobes and saturating color-fields, a good analogue for the sonic overload: On "Soon" the screen behind the band was filled with horizontal lines flexing to the beat, like some cosmic ECG scan. "Soon" on Loveless is a shot of cyborg discipline after 10 tracks of sensual mess: Magnificent but almost out of place. Live, it was the group's finest moment-- thunderous defibrillating rhythms, majestic jet engine glide, and that infectious jangle capering between the two. "Soon"'s mix of noise and muscle was the blueprint for the MBV live experience and also its most giddy, amazing peak.

Over their 15-year hiatus, there's been a tendency to forget that My Bloody Valentine were a band. They've settled into history as a lone perfectionist's visionary project, and if you never saw them it's become easy to think of them as what they became on Loveless: a brand name for the sounds in Shields' head. Whatever else this tour achieves, it should restore their reputation as a unit. As a singer, Shields was barely spotlit and less audible, retreating into the shadows of the stacks at stage right. Instead, Debbie Googe and Colm O'Ciosoig held the center. Googe was all effort, flexing and clawing at her bass like she was wrestling the chaos into some comprehensible shape. O'Ciosoig, behind her, urged the noise on, thrashing his kit with unrestrained glee. Bilinda Butcher, serene on the left, seemed a kindlier presence: As the volume crept up you weren't sure whether you were hearing her voice or a ghost-memory filled in by your reeling brain, but either way she stood as a reminder that MBV have always soothed as well as roared.

It's a measure of how awed the audience were by the very idea of this reunion that when the band appeared and blasted into "Only Shallow"-- Shields' "one, two" the only time anyone on stage would speak-- I could only see two or three camera phones held up. The moment was too much to save for later: This experience had to be taken in direct. By the end though, during the "You Made Me Realise" white-out, the room was a forest of phones. The secret of what MBV used to call the "holocaust section" wasn't that it's a personal test, like an indie rock bungee jump: It was a communal experience, a time to turn away from the band and look at the frightened, thrilled, pained faces of fellow devotees, their clothes and hair rippling in the 129 decibel breeze the amps generate.

There were free earplugs at the merch table and on the door: If you see the band, and that offer stands, take them up on it-- the plugs help you enjoy the sound's impact at gut and body level. Plugged up, the "holocaust section" sounded less like frontal-assault white noise and more like the recordings made of weather or atmospheric events, only played at horrifying volumes: unending stratospheric rumble and crackle. It seemed right for a reunion that promised something elemental and delivered in full.